I have finally completed Darwin's God by Cornelius Hunter. A very interesting read. Basically, quoting from the writings of Darwin and his disciples, Hunter argues that Darwinism is a kind of theodicy. The reason: nature is too violent and wasteful to attribute to God, so the scientists and other thinkers of the Victorian age attributed such imperfection to the workings of secondary causes.
Hunter identifies this as a kind of gnosticism, because of its dualistic overtones. The imperfections of the material order must remain separated from the perfection of the spiritual.
Such labelling sounds ominous, as if a great heresy has resurfaced, but it simply underscores the point that Christianity, in whatever age, must struggle with how the problem of evil affects the credibility of its claims about the benevolence of the Creator.
(People today are powerfully aware of evil in all its forms, from natural evil to the evil sometimes manifested in the workings of the church. See this interesting article from Christianity Today on Starbucks Spirituality, which highlights the level of distrust Christians face from historically conscious, cosmopolitan coffee lovers.)
Anyway, getting back to the book, quoting from "The Descent of Man," Hunter notes that Darwin's stated primary objective was to disprove the theory of "special creation" of each and every species by God. Secondarily he was out to prove the theory of natural selection.
Read or listen to any number of Darwinists, such as Richard Dawkins, and you will find repeated references to God, and attempts to discredit theories of special divine creation. Abstain from references to God, Hunter argues, all of the guesswork and speculation about vestigial organs, homologies, etc. would be glaring, and would never be accepted as "scientific."
Indeed, when many Darwinists argue that the theory is a "fact," what they mean is their interpretation of certain pieces of the physical record apparently falsify a particular account of creation. This despite the fact, as Hunter points out amply, that almost nothing in the physical record can falsify Darwinism. What Karl Popper would say is the mark of pseudo-science.
Indeed, the handwriting was on the wall when Darwin said about the complexity of the human eye that all he needed was to be able to conceive of a possible way, rather than show actual proof for, an evolution from less complex structures, and you see evidence of something other than science taking place here.
(My interpretation of this is that once "supernaturalism" is discarded as falsified by any one of millions of potential physical phenomena, a gestalt shift takes place and there is no choice but to interpret all physical phenomena through the lens of naturalism.)
This is exactly what I noted was troubling to me in a comment by eminent physicist Leonard Susskind's on Fora.tv, who blithely accepted such a speculative approach in response to questions about Paley's Watchmaker analogy and the "irreducible complexity" argument put forward by the "Intelligent Design" camp.
What do I take away from this work? An interesting, historically rich overview of Darwinism as attempted falsification of another theory, and/or a theodicy, full of insights into how the problem of evil vexed the Victorians.
But more importantly, Hunter's book, by its omission, painfully underscores the most pressing issue of modern Christianity. For if, as Hunter argues, Darwinism simply attempts to "falsify" one particular account of creation popular in a particular time, what is the alternative, more rational theory of creation, which can overcome the link between creation's irrationality and the Creator, without drifting into heretical dualism? Hunter doesn't answer that question.
Can anyone?
